Tuesday, February 22, 2011

Some of you might have noticed the introduction of the "SLES for VMware" templates in SUSE Studio several weeks ago. These templates allow you to create specialized server appliances that are optimized to run on VMware vSphere. If you have an active vSphere subscription, you can get an entitlement
to receive patches and updates directly from VMware. Support is
available by VMware, too.

VMware templates are based on Novell's SLES-for-VMware repositories which are similiar to SUSE Linux Enterprise Server 11 SP 1, but tailored to run on VMware vSphere. Some of the packages which are part of SLES11 SP1 are removed for the SLES-for-VMware repositories, mainly Xen and KVM related. Other packages were branded by VMware, those are mainly theming packages for grub, KDE and Gnome.

To create your own SLES for VMware appliance, go to the "Create new appliance" page and select the SLES-for-VMware template. Besides the ability to add custom logo and background images, you will find most of the well-known options to configure your appliance with SUSE Studio.

Customize your appliance as you would do on any other appliance made with SUSE Studio and click the "Build". Only two build formats are available: OVF and VMDK.

Visit VMware homepage to get more information about SUSE Linux Enterprise for VMware. You can also read the SLES for VMware FAQ or ask via the usual channels (forum, mailing list).

Monday, February 21, 2011

We've been receiving a lot of very positive feedback since we added Amazon EC2 support in SUSE Studio, so I'd just like to take a moment to thank everyone for their support!

Feature requests keep coming in, but one in particular stands out due to its popularity -- the ability to create openSUSE EBSAMIs. This is especially useful as Amazon's free usage tier does not support instance-store backed AMIs (which we already support in Studio for openSUSE).

So after some nudging from one of our users, Thomps, I did some hacking over the weekend and added openSUSE EBS support in the create_ebs_ami.sh script (which is by the way, open-source and available on Github). This will be merged into Studio soon.

While working on this, I noticed that there aren't any official public openSUSE AMIs out there, so I created some with SUSE Studio (32 bit, 64 bit). The full list of public openSUSE 11.3 AMIs are listed in the table below.

Region

Type

Arch

AMI ID

US East (Virginia)

EBS

i386

ami-acc83bc5

US East (Virginia)

EBS

x86_64

ami-00c83b69

US East (Virginia)

S3

i386

ami-d8cf3cb1

US East (Virginia)

S3

x86_64

ami-92cf3cfb

US West (N. California)

EBS

i386

ami-b7c090f2

US West (N. California)

EBS

x86_64

ami-a1c090e4

US West (N. California)

S3

i386

ami-61c19124

US West (N. California)

S3

x86_64

ami-77c19132

EU West (Ireland)

EBS

i386

ami-83dde9f7

EU West (Ireland)

EBS

x86_64

ami-93dde9e7

EU West (Ireland)

S3

i386

ami-27deea53

EU West (Ireland)

S3

x86_64

ami-19deea6d

Asia Pacific (Singapore)

EBS

i386

ami-bef886ec

Asia Pacific (Singapore)

EBS

x86_64

ami-8ef886dc

Asia Pacific (Singapore)

S3

i386

ami-54f98706

Asia Pacific (Singapore)

S3

x86_64

ami-5cf9870e

Asia Pacific (Tokyo)

EBS

i386

ami-b61bb0b7

Asia Pacific (Tokyo)

EBS

x86_64

ami-ba1bb0bb

Asia Pacific (Tokyo)

S3

i386

ami-b41bb0b5

Asia Pacific (Tokyo)

S3

x86_64

ami-a61bb0a7

List of public openSUSE 11.3 AMIs. S3 = instance-store.

With Amazon's free usage tier, you can run these openSUSE EBS AMIs completely free for the first 750 hours!

Copy and paste the appropriate AMI IDs here into your Amazon Management Console, or simply search for it there by selecting "Public Images" and "OpenSUSE". If you only want to run the AMIs from us, look out for the owner "720220196365".

We will also be releasing public openSUSE 11.4 AMIs when openSUSE 11.4 is released (10 March 2011), so stay tuned!